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Jim Rickards

There’s always some hope, but we’re about seven hours away from a momentous confrontation.

They’ve been on holidays for a few days. It’s 1:00 am right now in Hong Kong.

The arm of the executive is going to come back to work at 8 am, and what the students have said is that they don’t want to invade the office, they want to prevent him from getting into his office by surrounding the building.

This is what Jim means by “confrontation”.

We’ll see how it plays out. It’s a very volatile situation. They are really talking past each other.

From the students and the protestors point of view, this is a pro-democracy protest.

But from the communist party’s point of view, any protest, a religious protest, political or economic protest, has the potential to spin out of control.

We’ve seen this many times in Chinese history — most prominently the Taiping Rebellion in 1850, So they’re going to suppress it at all costs.

The students and the protestors understand how dangerous this is from the communist party’s point of view.

Democracy has something to do with this protest, but if you go back to Tianammen Square in 1989, that was known as a pro-democracy demonstration, but it was really about inflation.

You had people from the city and people coming up from the countryside protesting inflation, which was getting out of control.

It took on a pro-democracy flare, and we know it ended violently with an unknown number of casualties — perhaps in the thousands.

Growth in China is slowing down. There’s an enormous flight of capital, and the wealthy are getting their money out of China.

It looks like a rigged system and it is a rigged system. Income equality is getting worse.

This situation has a democracy catalyst, but what it really represents is a lot of frustration with economic inequality. That’s what is behind all of this.

That’s one of the reasons why it won’t go away quickly.

WHAT’S COMING UP

We’re cursed with these two-second attention spans.

Ukraine broke out in March and the market was a little nervous. Then they thought that was over. Now here we are in October and it’s not over.

ISIS came out and it looked like they were on the run, but that’s not over.

None of these crises are going away.

The Hong Kong crisis is not going away. We may be talking about this weeks or months from now.